Wind River plans embedded BSD operating system

Wind River Systems plans to develop an embedded version of the BSD/OS operating system that it bought in mid April (see separate story).

Before selling its software to Wind River, BSDi Software began work on an embeddable version of BSD/OS. The project aimed to get the size of the OS down to 2Mbyte.

Jerry Fiddler, chairman of Wind River, said: "They started work on e/BSD and we will continue that."

Fiddler could not yet say how e/BSD would be packaged or what level of modularity the OS would have. In the embedded systems sector, the full BSD/OS is used largely for network appliances, such as storage servers.

Wind River has also not yet decided whether to make a version of e/BSD available in an open-source form.

Fiddler added that Wind River will take some of the BSD technology into its main OS, VxWorks: "Some BSD technology will move down into VxWorks, such as the file system."